Jake

It was 2012, and my two sons were playing with a wooden train in our living room. Luke (age: eight) was diligently assembling the track while Flynn (age: baby) drooled on a locomotive. Then Luke picked his head up and said:

His question wasn’t intended to make me feel bad; he was just curious. But I didn’t have a good answer. I mean, sure, there was probably some excuse for checking my email right at that moment. But not a great one. All day, I’d been looking forward to spending time with my kids, and now that it was finally happening, I wasn’t really there at all.

At that moment, something clicked. It wasn’t just that I had succumbed to one moment of distraction—I had a bigger problem.

Every day, I realized, I was reacting: to my calendar, to incoming email, to the infinite stream of new stuff on the Internet. Moments with my family were slipping past me, and for what? So I could answer one more message or check off another to-do?

The realization was frustrating because I was already trying to find balance. When Luke was born in 2003, I’d set out on a mission to become more productive at work so that I could spend more quality time at home.

By 2012, I considered myself a master of productivity and efficiency. I kept reasonable hours and was home in time for dinner every night. This was what work/life balance looked like, or so I believed.

But if that was the case, why was my eight-year-old son calling me out for being distracted? If I was so on top of things at work, why did I always feel so busy and scattered? If I started the morning with two hundred emails and got to zero by midnight, was that really a successful day?

Then it hit me: Being more productive didn’t mean I was doing the most important work; it only meant I was reacting to other people’s priorities faster.

As a result of being constantly online, I wasn’t present enough with my children. And I was perpetually putting off my big “someday” goal of writing a book. In fact, I’d procrastinated for years without typing so much as a page. I’d been too busy treading water in a sea of other people’s emails, other people’s status updates, and snapshots of other people’s lunch.

I wasn’t just disappointed in myself, I was pissed off. In a fit of irritation, I grabbed my phone and furiously uninstalled Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. As each icon disappeared from my homescreen, I felt a weight lift.

Then I stared at the Gmail app and gritted my teeth. At that time, I had a job at Google, and I’d spent years working on the Gmail team. I loved Gmail. But I knew what I had to do. I can still remember the message that popped up on the screen asking me, almost in disbelief, if I was sure I wanted to remove the app. I swallowed hard and tapped “Delete.”

Without my apps, I expected to feel anxiety and isolation. And in the days after that, I did notice a change. But I wasn’t stressed; instead, I felt relief. I felt free.

I stopped reflexively reaching for my iPhone at the slightest hint of boredom. Time with my kids slowed down in a good way. “Holy smokes,” I thought. “If the iPhone wasn’t making me happier, what about everything else?”

I loved my iPhone and all the futuristic powers it gave me. But I also had accepted every default that came with those powers, leaving me constantly tethered to the shiny device in my pocket. I started wondering how many other parts of my life needed to be reexamined, reset, and redesigned. What other defaults was I accepting blindly, and how could I take charge?

Soon after my iPhone experiment I took a new job. It was still at Google, only now I worked at Google Ventures, a venture-capital firm that invested money in outside startups.

The first day there, I met a guy named John Zeratsky.

At first, I wanted to dislike him. John is younger and—let’s be honest—better-looking than I am. Even more despicable, however, was his constant calm. John was never stressed. He completed important work ahead of schedule yet somehow found time for side projects. He woke early, finished work early, went home early. He was always smiling. What the hell was his deal?

Well, I ended up getting along just fine with John, or as I call him, JZ. I soon discovered he was a kindred spirit—my brother from another mother, if you will.

Like me, JZ was disillusioned with the Busy Bandwagon. We both loved technology and had spent years designing tech services (while I was at Gmail, he was at YouTube). But we were both beginning to understand the cost of these Infinity Pools to our attention and time.

And like me, JZ was on a mission to do something about it. He was kind of like Obi-Wan Kenobi about this stuff, only instead of a robe, he wore plaid shirts and jeans, and instead of the Force, he was interested in what he called “the system.” It was almost mystical. He didn’t know exactly what it was, but he believed it existed: a simple framework for avoiding distractions, maintaining energy, and making more time.

I know; it sounded kind of weird to me, too. But the more he talked about what such a system could look like, the more I found myself nodding my head. JZ was way into ancient human history and evolutionary psychology, and he saw that part of the problem was rooted in the huge disconnect between our hunter-gatherer roots and our crazy modern world. He looked through the lens of a product designer and figured this “system” would work only if it changed our defaults, making distractions harder to access instead of relying on willpower to constantly fight them.

Well, heck, I thought. If we could create this system, it would be exactly what I was looking for. So I teamed up with JZ, and the quest began. 53SPZwWeNnn3qfLsn02ji0ka48ksOIvWtHEfB3Mh59gaOf4NzEvNM/B3nQ7gytOp